Candidate Profile: Curt Greenwalt, candidate for commissioner-at-large position No. 2

A veteran educator and a successful leader of the East Adams County Healthcare Foundation, Curt Greenwalt believes he can assist the local hospital district as it endures a transition.

For that reason and others, he has become a candidate for Adams County Public Hospital District No. 2’s commissioner-at-large position No. 2.

Raised in Ritzville, Greenwalt is a 1972 graduate of Ritzville High School. In 1976 he earned a Bachelors of Science in agriculture education from Washington State University. In 1979 he added a Master’s degree in adult and continuing education from WSU.

He and his wife, Lynn, have been married for 35 years and have raised two sons, Travis and Tyler Greenwalt.

Presently he is a bus driver, farmer and owner/operator of a family business “Ole World Oils.”

The bulk of Greenwalt’s professional career has been as an educator. He was the agriculture teacher at Palouse High School for seven years. Afterward he spent 19 years at Liberty High School and then four years at Moses Lake School teaching agriculture.

For two years he has served as president of East Adams County Healthcare Foundation. He is also a member of the National FFA Agronomy Committee.

Locally he is a past member of the Ritzville Public Development Association, has served the Bronc Boosters Club and been on the hospital district’s facilities planning committee.

Greenwalt also took part in a mission trip with the Nazarene Church.

As an educator, he is past president of the Washington Vocational Agriculture Teacher’s Association.

He earned the Excellence in Education Award for 2006 for Moses Lake High School. In 1983 he was named Agriculture Teacher of the Year. Greenwalt has also garnered numerous FFA leadership awards.

As a candidate, Greenwalt is not accepting campaign contributions and said he has chosen to not seek financial assistance.

In his candidate statement, he said:

“I decided to run for hospital commissioner because I care about the future of our local hospital and the services it offers. As a taxpayer and property owner I want to make sure that the taxpayers’ money is spent prudently on our healthcare facility and the money is being spent on the needs of our community members.

“I believe we need to stabilize the cash flow of the hospital district before we can talk about a new building. All the services we now offer in our current hospital need to be part of the discussion whenever we, the district patrons, decide to build a new hospital. We do, however, need to insure that the current facility meets state standards for the well being of patrons of the district as well as the needs of the employees so they can adequately do their jobs. We are fortunate to have an excellent staff at the hospital.

“I would like to see our town become a community again. I think we are all striving to reach the same goal and that is keeping the excellent healthcare we currently have. It is time to respect each other’s opinion and listen to the concerns of all the district patrons. Let’s do what is right and beneficial for the community and not dwell in the past but look to the future and try to improve what we have.

“Stop the gossip and rumor mills, if you have a question, go to the source and ask questions. Listen to both sides of every story. If elected commissioner I will be open and transparent. I will listen and answer questions I can answer and those I cannot I will find the answer for you. I would like to see a commissioner’s column, possibly in The Journal, answering questions submitted by hospital district members.”

How did you become involved with the healthcare foundation?

“It was a place that my wife and I could both take part in a community activity that was good for the community that appealed to me. They just do a lot of neat things within the community. All the money they make basically gets given back. And they have started a scholarship program and I like to see that.”

What is the relationship between the foundation and the hospital district?

“I think every community hospital in the state has a foundation. There are some aspects to the financial part of that, that are reasons why every hospital started them to begin with. Now we do little things that maybe the hospital doesn’t have enough money for. Or, they would rather put their money into a bigger project like the new CT scanner and we step in and do two or three little projects for them.

As an observer what were your thoughts in terms of the handling of the contract process with the former physicians?

“I have served on enough boards and committees in my time as an ag teacher and was president of the ag teachers association so I served on some national committees.

“I think the thing a lot of people don’t realize is people on boards and committees tend to have a little bit different information than maybe the average person. That’s just part of an organization. Not that the boards know everything.

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying they’re given a lot more information. So its real hard to sit on the outside and look into a board and say this is what I would have done or this is what I think they should have done because I don’t think we know all the information they have.

Were you satisfied with how it was handled?

“I think in those situations it’s just like dealing with kids or dealing with anything. I think if you can communicate, if you can keep talking you can keep the dialogue open and can keep it flowing, I think good things are going to happen. I’m not sure before the end of January, that meeting down at the Lions building, I’m not sure what all went on behind closed doors and in lawyers’ offices. I don’t know the board side. I don’t think I have heard that exactly. I don’t know if they’re talking about what went on.”

Could it have been handled better?

“Looking back now. And again, hindsight, as everybody knows hindsight is 20/20. If you knew August 15th what it was going to be like when you were doing that meeting, they maybe would have done things different too.

“Was I, or wasn’t I satisfied. I don’t know if that really matters anymore. What matters is where we are now and what we have to do to improve the town of Ritzville. You can look at a glass as half full or glass half empty. I guess I am a little bit of an optimist.

“One of the things if I get elected that I really want to see done is, I want to see a doctor hired in that clinic. And what’s best for the town of Ritzville, two doctors or three doctors? I’ll take three doctors. I think that’s better for the town. I am glad Marty and Valerie stayed. I think that it would have been devastating if they hadn’t stayed.”

Some citizens have said the commissioners aren’t listening to the taxpayers. Do you agree?

“I’ll tell you I have been in situations in the past where I represented the state of Washington ag teachers voting in national situations and I have been opposed to what state of Washington teachers want, but I will vote the way they wanted because I represented them.

“I wasn’t a board member. I wasn’t a commissioner. I didn’t answer their phones. I don’t know who called them and who talked to them and I don’t know what percent of people felt which way. But I would tend to follow the people and what they want. That’s what I did when I was an ag teacher and did different boards and committees like that.”

Since you became a candidate, what have people had to say?

“That has been interesting. I have heard a lot of different things. I’ve heard everything from the fact that they want the doctors back in the hospital. I think that’s obvious. I’ve heard that they are glad they are here and they want to see another doctor in Ritzville because there used to be four or five and they think there’s enough people left in the district to run a pretty good practice.

“I have heard ‘we don’t need a clinic in the hospital. We never used to have one.’

“I have heard ‘let’s just do away with the hospital and have a clinic.’ Which I think is kind of radical and boy, I’m opposed to that one. I think it’s really all over the board as far as what people have said.”

Should the administration live in the district?

“I would love to see those people live within our district. I felt like that when I was a teacher. I always lived in the district except when I taught in Moses Lake. I lived in Ritzville then.

“I think when you are making — just like a superintendent of schools or a principal of schools — I would expect them to live in the town just because they get taxpayer money and you kind of expect that. That would be one thing I would like to see done at the hospital. But, can they do that legally?

“I don’t think the board set things up this way. Circumstances set things up. It all came at one time.

“If all of this hadn’t gone on with the doctors and the contract hadn’t been up this year I doubt if we’d be talking about the four people living outside of the district. Since all this came up at one time it just seems like it has magnified everything.”

When Paul Lewis resigned commissioners opposed national search in favor of saving money. Since then the district has spent thousands on lawyers, contract consultants and advisors. Are the spending practices contradictory?

“You want to save money on one hand and then you are freely spending on the other. I tend to worry about things I can deal with. In that situation I’d probably tend to be pretty darn conservative type of individual.

“The money spent has got to make a return. That’s how I look at it when I do things in farming. You don’t just spend money to spend money.

“You spend money to make a return. If you are going to get the money back plus some then that’s a good investment.

Can you talk about the district income you receive?

“ $500 a month. I checked into that with a lawyer. Two things with that. First of all the contract that we signed with hospital district was signed during Paul Lewis’s time. If I do get elected, that’s a precondition thing. It’s $500 a month that we rent our basement for temps or in this case, the x-ray tech. I guess in his contract they signed a deal with housing for him.

“Honestly we do save the district money compared to the Bronco Inn. The lawyer said, unless you are receiving “1,500 or over a month, he didn’t see any problem with conflict of interest. We haven’t done anything illegal or shady. It’s pretty straight forward. Just purely a coincidence how all of that came about.

District clinic volumes have fallen. How do you bring people back to the building?

“I think if you are a Doctor Sackmann or a Doctor Eckley patient, I really don’t think you are going to go back to the clinic.

I would hope they would continue to use the hospital, the physical therapy, the swing bed and the lab.

“There are two entities up there, the clinic and the hospital. We could survive without a clinic in that hospital. We would be fine.”

As for people who wouldn’t use the clinic previously, how do you capture those who have never been willing to set foot in the facility.

“I saw a study where it was 25 percent of market share. Where 75 percent of the people in the district were not using the facilities. In that situation I think a benefit to those people would be to bring in a new doctor and let him or her develop a practice in that clinic.

“I think there’s enough people. I think there’s enough opportunity in this district you could develop a third doctor. If you develop a third doctor in that clinic you stop the flow of red ink hopefully, not all of it, but some of it.

“I think the clinic and the hospital were losing money even pre-February 1. So if we get back to that situation where hey we’re bleeding, but we’re not bleeding profusely anymore and we have three doctors in town and we have our hospital running, we’re really ahead of the game.

“And if you get the finances stable, I think people do realize that eventually this community is going to need to look at a complete remodel or a new building.”

Where do you stand as far as building a new hospital?

“The question that I have, and I don’t know if I ever got a direct answer from somebody is that if they did that remodel, would that be a shutdown of that hospital while they did it or would they do a wing at a time like Whitman County did in Colfax? I think that would be a deciding factor for my opinion.

“If you go through the building and you look at where the technology is and where the building facility is, something needs to be done. But right now I don’t think that (public) vote would stand much of a chance until we do stop the flow of red ink and we stabilize that quite a bit.

Would you support having the local doctors work emergency room and weekend shifts?

“I would be for that right now. I don’t know why not.”

How do you turn around the community unrest?

“Maybe one step in turning that around is to have doctors Eckley and Sackmann working in the emergency room on weekends or something like that. I honestly don’t have any grievance with anybody at this point.

“I don’t like the way things are in the community. I hate the division that we have and I want to see everything work. I am really glad our doctors are here and I am really glad our hospital is here and I want to do everything I can to keep both.

“If we get a doctor in the clinic and we get another practice going in that clinic its just going to be another benefit for our town. That is what I want to see.”

If there was a motion to terminate the CEO’s contract, where would you stand?

“Nothing is that simple. There must be strings attached, $140,000 (severance) that’s a lot of money. I would think about that. One of my questions dealing with that would be, where are we right now in a physician search. By terminating the CEO would we potentially lose a doctor? Paying $140,000 and potentially losing a doctor, I don’t know if that’s worth it to me.”

What do you look for in a new physician?

“I think that’s a relatively easy answer. Saying that everything is equal as far education and training, I think experience says a lot. And then the second thing is small town living. Would that doctor and their family, would they be satisfied and happy living in a small town. It has its pros. It has its cons. I think that is something that would be huge. I would not like to see a doctor come for a year or two and not be happy and leave.”

What will you bring to the table if elected?

“I taught for 30 years. You just can’t please everybody when you teach. You learn to listen to people, genuinely listen and try to explain your position and listen to the constituents and see what the majority of the people think, not just the loudest, the majority.

“I think that’s where I am. I think I am fairly level headed. I think I am fairly patient. I listen. I know I listen well after dealing with kids and parents all those years.”

Do you believe the loudest segment of the public is not the majority?

“I don’t know about that. I think that’s something we will find out in November. I get a lot of feedback just all over the board as far as what people would like to see. Where they are with this. There’s obviously a group of people that are more upset than others and they have a right to be heard.”

What will your top priorities be?

“My top priority would be to put a doctor in that clinic and try to stabilize the cash flow situation. And then let’s get that done and lets look down the road and see where we are with a hospital, either remodel or new construction. It all depends on when we find a doctor really, and then I’d like to see more specialists.

“I would like to see the hospital get involved in conjunction with the school. It turns out quite a few students go into the medical field in some aspect, nursing or lab tech or x-ray tech.

“I would like to see some of these kids be able to work there or job shadow. Or spend a period a day there so they get a little experience on their resume.

How will healing in the community occur?

“I don’t know how anybody ever heals without talking. I would be willing as a commissioner to go talk to the doctors and say ‘what can we do as a hospital to help you? How would this work?

“I think if we can get working together, all the healthcare professionals in the community, I think that would heal the community.”